This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

A palm-sized "robo-bat" with shape memory alloy jointed limbs and smart material alloy muscles is being built by North Carolina State University researchers. It's the perfect micro air vehicle (MAV) for surveillance or other kinds of data gathering — Batman could fit this gadget easily onto his utility belt.

Six in 10 companies in a survey plan to skip the purchase of Microsoft's Windows 7 computer operating system! Many of them to pinch pennies and others over concern about compatibility with their existing applications.

Cat owners who think their cats control them now have some scientific confirmation since animal vocalization experts have just identified a special manipulative purr that felines have evolved, in part, to get what they want from people.

Yes, the job is in Best Buy's marketing department and involves "emerging media," but it's still jarring to see an employment ad list under preferred qualifications: "250-plus followers on Twitter." The ad also shows a lack of Twitter savvy in that almost any twit can attain 250 followers with little or no effort.

Senegalese singing sensation Youssou N'Dour encourages families to sleep under mosquito nets. The song tells the story of a man whose girlfriend left him because he got malaria. As he seeks sympathy, members of the community tell him it's all his fault. He should have been sleeping under a treated mosquito net.

An actual dispute over who is legally entitled to market athletic apparel with the pitch "Does this [article of clothing] make my butt look fast?" has erupted into a federal case, filed last week in San Francisco.

Battlefield 1943 gets you into the action quickly and easily, although the thrills to be found inside may not be as long-lasting as we've come to the expect from the franchise. Plus, a console launch? Ars explores the new face of battle.

The FDA will now require warning labels on Chantix and Zyban, two popular anti-smoking prescription drugs that it says could spark changes in a patient, including depression, hostility and suicidal thoughts.

Technophiles like ourselves who are also frugal have, in the past, purchased upgrade editions of Windows, and been able to do a clean, fresh install either by entering a prior valid license key or inserting a CD for the older software at install time. That went away with Vista, which required a hacky workaround. Here are the new rules:

Geeks and movies go together quite nicely. I've been thinking about films that reflect tech and geek culture, and have pulled together a list of 15 movies that should probably be on any geek's must-see list. These are in no particular order, except that the first one is my No. 1 Must-Watch-for-Geek-Cred film. What is your favorite geek movie?

Ever since the murder of Rian Thal two weeks ago in Philadelphia, everyone wants to know how this girl from a wealthy suburb ended up a high-stakes drug trafficker in the city's hip-hop scene—but it's not as unusual as you might think.

Compared to almost all other animals, human brains are larger as a percentage of body weight. And since the emergence of the first species in our ***** genus (***** habilis) about 2 million years ago, the human brain has doubled in size. And when compared to earlier ancestors, such as australopithecines that lived 4 million to 2 million years ago.

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive - because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most. Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell) an extremely serious problem.....

Crazy how life imitates art sometimes. In the first days of the swine flu outbreak, when the first victims passed away and governments and doctors alike asked us not to panic, didn't you also get a strange sense of déjà vu? Didn't newspaper headlines and TV bulletins seem to repeat scenes from dozens of horror films?